Free vs fee – the future of news
Jinfo Blog

4th November 2009

By Penny Crossland

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The future of the news industry has been a hot topic for most of this year, with LiveWire contributors regularly posting on the battle between online and print (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26321 http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24652 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24414). In the past week, London’s Evening Standard newspaper decided to go free completely, thereby driving three other free sheets out of business. In the US, The New York Times had a pay wall, then went free, and is now re-introducing charges. The industry is in complete flux and so yesterday’s SLA Europe event in London could not have come at a better time. A capacity audience listened to a lively debate between representatives from both sides of the fence. The consensus amongst the panellists was that the newspaper industry had made a mistake all those years ago by offering its content free on the web, hoping that advertising would make it all pay. However, now that the advertising industry is in the doldrums, this strategy is no longer feasible. ‘The toothpaste is out of the tube’, as Laurence Rafsky of Acquire Media put it so eloquently, and the question is ‘should we pay for the survival of newspapers?’. Jeremy Lawson of Dow Jones argued that newspaper publishers, who try to introduce pay walls having previously offered their content free, would find themselves in considerable trouble. Sophisticated pay models are required, cross-border tax issues need to be considered and efficient customer service departments need to be established. Digital media law expert Laurence Kaye argued that professional journalism - i.e. trusted content - would always have a place, but we will have to address the issue of copyright and legal versus illegal content. Online users now expect content to be free and many fail to see that copyright matters. As Kaye pointed out, we are lacking a 21st century copyright infrastructure to make licensing work. As is often the case, the law is lagging behind technology. Andrew Hughes, representing the Newspaper Licensing Agency (http://www.nla-web.com), argued for a sophisticated copyright system, operable in a business environment. According to Hughes, publishers needed to take responsibility for packaging content for different markets and for creating editorial value. Why not differentiate between content for business and content for consumers? The FT and the WSJ were cited as examples of specialised content for which readers are willing to pay. Mobile phone users are willing to pay for applications – paying for packaged news would be a similar approach. The NLA announced earlier this year that it would be charging web aggregators and their client companies from January 2010 (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21244), and a further point raised at the meeting was whether news aggregators actually create revenue for newspapers, by providing links to their sites. Apparently, newspapers currently receive between 65% and 85% of their traffic via Google. Are aggregators and Google doing publishers a favour? As to the future – Laurence Rafsky predicted that the youth of tomorrow would no longer want to read newspapers and that print newspapers would cease to exist by 2030. The other panellists did not agree with that cut-off date, but did believe that the industry would have changed beyond recognition by then. Current publishing costs are unsustainable and will result in much slimmed down newspapers. An interesting debate that is set to continue….

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